The Man and his Honours

 

Tesla's final period, covering the years 1905, when the Wardenclyffe project was abandoned, and 1943 when he died, were more to do with Tesla the icon than Tesla the brilliant experimentalist and engineer.  His offices in New York became a Mecca for inventive pilgrims and admirers, Tesla himself unfolded into the mysterious habits he had always been prone to but had never been too obvious when he was immersed in his projects.  Much of his developing eccentricity has been attributed to the death of his mother in 1892

 

His life became a paradox, a strict protocol and regimen from which he would periodically deviate.  His personal culture was fussy, and nearly always that which he perceived to be the habits of a gentleman - he was tall elegant and carried himself proudly.  His dress was always immaculate.  His clothes were regulated, he wore tailored suits, high button hand-made shoes and his ties were either black or red striped.  Even his dove grey gloves were unfailingly replaced at the same time each week at $1 per pair.

 

Tesla lived a seemingly lonely and aloof existence - he was principled and unyielding.  He never appeared to court women and apparently had no sexual involvement at all though he always employed young attractive secretaries who were heavily governed by Tesla in their attire.  He had a definite dress code for his female employees and insisted on things being de mode.  Tesla was proud of what he had become. He expected respect, expected service, but was always generous in return when his aloof dignity and massive personal vanity was fostered.  He was intellectually gifted, superbly knowledgeable and the keeper of an ideal.  Yet he was not averse to being seen drinking in the notorious New York Bowery or attending rowdy burlesque shows.

 

He never moved from hotels because he expected exemplary hotel service (as  it was then) as a minimum, and wanted no part of a domestic existence.  He avoided the things which offended him, and there were many.  His foibles and anathemas' were great, he could not eat at a dinner party if a female guest was wearing pearls and, except for formal requests, he would always eat alone, served only by the head waiter, refusing offers to join him and only holding dinner parties himself when it suited.  His friends and acquaintances generally saw him at luncheon.  Conversely, he allowed wild pigeons, particularly one female for whom he had a marked and somewhat unhealthy predilection, to live in his apartments.  Twice hotels insisted he either refrain from feeding his pigeons or move - Tesla moved.  Yet, for all this, Tesla was thought to be a charming and fulfilling associate and his clipped, perfectly pronounced and almost archaic speaking 'made you want to listen'.  He was a bad business man who was intelligent enough to realise that in this respect he was his own worst enemy.  He hired a business manager, but then neglected his advice.

 

In 1912 Tesla refused to share the Nobel Prize in physics with Edison - even though he was desperately in need of the $20,000 dollars it would have brought.  He was offended at having the Nobel committee treat him and Edison on equal terms but was even more resentful of Marconi who had received the Nobel accolade three years earlier; Tesla honestly believed he had precedence over Marconi in radio communication, though unlike Marconi, Tesla appears never to have modulated his radio signals with telegraphy or speech and undoubtedly Oliver Lodge would have contended Tesla's claims regarding the tuned circuit.  Tesla's dispute with the Nobel committee was damaging, in the end they disavowed both Tesla and Edison and offered the prize to the Swedish engineer/scientist Nils Gustav Dalen.  It was awarded to Dalen for his light sensitive gas valve used in unmanned lighthouses etc, and for work on acetylene, but more importantly for his investigations into the safe use of explosive gas mixtures.  (An unkindly omen, it was said, for a laboratory explosion blinded Dalen in the same year he became the Nobel laureate.  Though sightless he later invented the AGA cooker in 1924).

 

Curiously, in 1917, Tesla grudgingly condescended to accept the Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, but not without some indifference - just prior to the award ceremony he was found to be missing.  He was discovered in New York's Plaza Library festooned with pigeons who had come to eat the bird-seed that Tesla always bought for them.  Later, short of money, Tesla pawned the solid gold Edison Medal to pay his secretaries and to buy bird seed.

 

Contrary to his lifelong meticulousness in his engineering, Tesla seldom recorded anything in writing (though he occasionally kept a diary).  He could depend on an almost perfect recall and it appears that he rarely made technical notes unless it was for a lecture or a publication.  It is true that most of his earlier technical records were lost when the first New York laboratory burnt down, but little of his later work survives either.  Most of his lecture notes survive, he wrote articles, preliminary patent specifications (he is credited with 116 patents in 9 different categories), had a wealth of personal correspondence and gave many interviews, but of his engineering notes little is now extant.  This has resulted in there being much to challenge about what Tesla actually accomplished, though few in his circle of contemporaries, nor his adherents today, harboured any doubts.  Even his thoughts on a Death Ray, much publicised in 1933, never received a comprehensive description.

 

Tesla once said that he expected to live to be at least 100 and that he would complete an auto-biography in good time.  In the event, and by his own standards, he died prematurely (and alone) in his New Yorker Hotel room on the night of Thursday the 7th of January 1943.  Within hours the FBI had seized what few papers were in Tesla's safe in the interests of national security.

 

Those in Tesla's select band of admirers mourned his passing but comparatively few in the year of his death recognised his name in the obituaries.  The Tesla Superman was dead and had been for many decades so the majority of the public thought.  Engineers, on the other hand would never forget, nor would many scientists.

 

Three months after Tesla died the US Supreme Court overturned the Marconi patents in radio and awarded precedence to Tesla though this had little effect in correcting the popular view of Tesla's place in originating radio.  Later, In 1954 it was proposed and approved by the International Electrical Commission that the unit of magnetic flux density (or magnetic induction, equivalent to 1 weber m-2) be given the term Tesla.  This was also approved and instituted by the International Union of Applied Physics in 1961.  An honour Tesla would have appreciated given that neither Edison nor Marconi were even mentioned.